Thursday, February 03, 2005

We purchased an EPSON Perfection 4870 Photo Scanner in the hopes of
using [Kodak's] DIGITAL ICE Photo Print Technology to remove the fine
surface cracks that are present in all 19th century albumen prints and
which significantly degrade the quality of such scans.

Unfortunately, because the cracks are of a much smaller scale than the
macroscopic defects in cracked prints for which your software
apparently is optimized, automatic defect removal just does not
currently work. The microscopic cracks are well within the 4,800 dpi
resolution of the Epson scanner, but the software does not correctly
identify these as defects to repair. No reason is apparent why your
method of doing a double scan with different lighting angles should not
work equally as well at the smaller scale needed to remove these
surface cracks

We hope that the DIGITAL ICE Photo Print Technology could easily repair
the fine cracks seen in albumen prints, if the parameters of your
algorithm could be adjusted by the user for the microscopic size of the
cracks, or if a "fine surface cracks" option could be added to the
software.

Would Kodak be willing to attempt to make DIGITAL ICE Photo Print
Technology useful for scanning 19th century albumen prints? Most
museums and libraries have 19th century photographic prints in their
collections, so making Kodak's software work to automatically repair
historic albumen print images would be extremely helpful. ...